David Peat

The End of Representation 103In the hands of Dutch and Spanish painters the illusionistic portrayalsof fruit, vegetables, and tableware gloried in the richness of texturesand surfaces and hinted at a spiritual essence within the naturalworld. Landscape painting could be used as a delight to the eye, anexperiment in observation, or an expression of a landowner’s wealth.During the nineteenth century many paintings were given over tostorytelling. Victorian narrative painting often presented a moral taleor expressed some socially suitable sentiment. Clearly this was mosteffective when the illusion of reality was preserved. Again the means ofrepresentation perfectly complemented the mindset of a society. VictorianEngland was hierarchical: individuals had their place, and lawand government were to be respected and heroes elevated. The poorand those displaced from the countryside were an inevitable consequenceof industrial expansion and so deserving of charity. Such figureswere portrayed sentimentally in painting and story. Heroes, onthe other hand, demanded vast canvases brimming with figures, suchas Benjamin West’s The Death of Wolfe. Living figures could be elevatedby painting them wrapped in cloaks or Roman togas. The pre-Raphaelites, rejecting materialism and the ugliness of industrial Britain,portrayed a return to some sort of Eden by means of highly detailedand realistic paintings.In France the Revolution and the subsequent rise of Napoleon representeda serious disruption of the prevailing social order. At suchtimes (as in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia) artists were expectedto be sober and, in their canvases, to give authority to a regime throughreference to well-established classical models. France found its courtpainter in Jacques-Louis David, who gave them allegories of contemporaryevents as if they were taking place in Rome or ancient Greece.In this case it was not so much an artist finding a visual means ofrepresenting the worldview of a society, but rather of supporting a fictionor fantasy of what that society would like to be. David’s approachworked because he was a painter of genius. Hitler and Stalin were notserved so well by their official painters. The supposed “heroic” portraitsof the German dictator, for example, look to us today like a ridiculouslittle man dressing up in an attempt to make himself largerthan life.